Prof. Dr. Ingolf Sack

My background is in Medical Physics with a focus on the development and exploitation of methods for image-resolved measurement of mechanical tissue properties, so called elastography. As taught to us by manual palpation, mechanical constants of soft body tissue can drastically change in the course of many diseases, rendering elastography sensitive to subtle tissue alterations on scales far below the resolution of conventional radiological images. Over the past years, I have pursued innovative applications of elastography using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and sonography for preclinical and clinical studies. My scientific driving force is the close collaboration with clinicians who see patients on a daily basis suffering from severe diseases such as high grade tumors, hepatic cirrhosis or heart insufficiency, for whom efficacious treatment may be delayed because adequate diagnostic tools are lacking. I was intrigued to learn that many suspicious lesions - such as breast tumors - can be detected by hand, while high-end imaging modalities fail to see any abnormality in the same tissue. This motivated me to invest the knowledge and capability gained over years long research in chemistry, solid state physics, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) and MRI into the development of diagnostic methods capable to detect the macroscopic footprint of micromechanical interactions.